The 10 Most Promising Books Coming in 2016

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The 10 Most Promising Books Coming in 2016

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Social critiques, comic books, and speculative fiction—your to-read list is about to get a lot longer.

Nobody can really predict which books will come to dominate the cultural conversation—but has that ever stopped anyone from trying? We at WIRED have done a close reading of 2016's line-up, picking the 10 titles we think will get the most people talking. With new Don DeLillo and Dana Spiotta novels and a memoir by our favorite intergalactic princess, it looks to be a fine year for reading.

Feb. 2Adam Grant, *Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World *(Viking)

With high praise from Malcolm Gladwell and J.J. Abrams, Grant’s latest looks set to join the required reading lists of many companies across America. In Originals, the young professor (he got full tenure at the Wharton School of Business while still in his twenties) argues that openness to progressive ideas is key to any field—whether in business, the arts, sports, or politics. While the stories of people going against the grain in their organizations have obvious "be a better company" applications, they also offer insights into a richer and more compelling narrative about speaking up in today’s corporate world. But what sets the Grant’s approach apart from other anti-groupthink thinking is its lead-by-example nature: being thoughtful about the way you effect change can encourage others to act.

After more than a decade without a novel, Alexander Chee is back in a big (nearly 600 pages) way. Set in France in the mid-19th century, his sweeping epic centers on Lilliet Berne, a Parisian opera singer who yearns to cement her legacy. Chee layers his narrative with images of the Second French Empire, all glitz and gaudy excess, that parallel Lilliet's reinvention of herself as a French operatic diva, after absconding America and moving across the Atlantic. Despite the nineteenth-century setting, the story couldn't be more appropriate for the Age of Kardashian—a masterful look at transformation and its unforeseen aftershocks.

March 1A. Igoni Barrett, Blackass (Graywolf Press)

The protagonist of Barrett's first novel is a young Nigerian man named Furo Wariboko who wakes up one day to find that he is no longer black, but white. With a job interview imminent, Furo fears that his whiteness is incompatible with the rest of his identity—his name, his accent, and his “black ass”—but soon finds that his white skin, flaming red hair, and magnetic green eyes help him conquer the job market. The book's magical realism allows Barrett to probe society's continuing bias whiteness, both explicit and covert; its allegorical ending proves that the writer's two acclaimed short-story collections didn't come close to exhausting his talent.

March 8Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others (Scribner)

Dana Spiotta has been sorely missed since her stellar novel *Stone Arabia *came out in 2012. This year she returns with *Innocents and Others, *which attracted attention thanks to a recent excerpt in The New Yorker. Spiotta’s protagonists in Innocents and Others, Meadow and Carrie—best friends who grow up together in the 1980s and later pursue filmmaking—encounter the loner Jelly; it's through these three women that Spiotta explores issues of self-imposed deception and artistic license. Against the backdrop of cinema, Spiotta conjures powerful images that show us what endures when relationships deteriorate.

April 26Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist (Blue Rider Press)

Carrie Fisher was smashing in The Force Awakens, but that didn't stop trolls from attacking her "aged" appearance. In her new memoir, The Princess Diarist, the popular and unashamedly candid actress looks more than ready to take on the social-media backlash, addressing the ongoing ageism that dictates the careers of so many women in Hollywood. In one handwritten page released on Twitter from the manuscript, Fisher writes: “My hours alone are spent wondering what I said, why I said it, why I shouldn’t have said it … what they think of me.” Using early diaries she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, Fisher promises to take a closer look at Princess Leia, examining how the decision to play the character changed her life.

May 10Don DeLillo, Zero K (Scribner)

The master of the postmodern epic returns with his most hotly anticipated novel in years. *Zero K *concerns Jeffrey Lockhart, who travels to a remote desert fortress to visit his billionaire father and dying stepmother. The facility works to preserve dying bodies until advances in medical science come along to revive them in the centuries ahead. Though the novel doesn't directly address issues of biomedicine and technology, its central (and sinister) preoccupation is the question of why people are committed to a life defined by death. Jeffrey is firmly in the realm of the living, alienated by his father’s determination to fight death and devoted to the world of “the intimate touch of earth and sun.” Away from the bunkers in the obscure heartlands of the Middle East, Jeffrey valiantly tries to reconnect with his remote father—but ultimately cannot, since his father has already moved on. It looks like the real deal: a provocative work that leaves readers with far more questions than answers. Classic DeLillo, in other words.

May 17Chris Lehman, The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House)

There’s already a growing din around the Bookforum editor’s first book. It's a sweeping social study that traces the (un)holy matrimony of money and religion, from Puritan days through the Industrial Revolution and up to the megachurches of today. The book is both an accessible study and strong piece of social criticism, enriched by Lehman's research and colored by his comical interviews and encounters with members of various churches. “Now … the link between the personal discipline exacted by one’s faith and the promised expansion of one’s bottom line is so casually reiterated in the evangelical world that it’s banal,” Lehman writes. The Money Cult is sure to send waves of backlash across religious sectors—nothing banal about that.

June 14Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Harper)

Roxane Gay, whose 2014 collection of essays Bad Feminist established her as an essential literary voice, is back with a second collection, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. With Bad Feminist, Gay interrogated the longstanding “perfectionism” that defines much of contemporary feminist thought, arguing for a necessary imperfection (hence the title). In Hunger, Gay offers a deeply personal collection of writing, reflecting on our culture’s relationship with food and the body. She looks at the paradox that defines consumption and food today: the obsession with eating food but the disgust for those who eat too much of it. In an age of excess and a culture obsessed with commodifying food, Hunger is a much-needed reflection on eating and the body, served up by one of today’s most important and popular thinkers.

August 9China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris (Del Rey)

Very little is known about Mieville’s forthcoming novel, apart from a short blurb available on an obscure Chinese literary website. Naturally, this only elevates the intrigue and hype surrounding exactly what the fantasy novelist has cooked up. From what little we know, The Last Days of New Paris is about an alternative universe, one born out of a rebellion against the Nazis taking France in 1940 during WWII. One dissenting fighter decides that the only way to defeat the Nazis is to build a “Surrealist bomb,” but the bomb goes off before its designated detonation and sweeps Paris into “Surrealist cataclysm … transform[ing] it according to a violent, weaponized dream logic.” As an active member of the International Socialist Organization, Mieville has been accused of—in his words—"trying to smuggle in [an] evil message by the nefarious means of a fantasy novel.” Whether or not he's doing so here, we'll be reading.

Fall 2016Margaret Atwood, Angel Catbird (Dark Horse Comics)

You read that right: Partnering with Dark Horse, the legendary Atwood is releasing a comic book.* *The project sees the Canadian novelist collaborating with Canadian comic book artist Johnnie Christmas to, in the words of the announcement, “concoct a superhero who is part cat, part bird.” Atwood has always been interested in changing technologies and post-apocalyptic worlds, with some of her best novels—like The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Heart Goes Last (2015)—set in futuristic dystopias. As one of the world’s great contemporary novelists, whose novels examine oppressive social structures and dangerous advances in technology, Atwood will no doubt help further comic books' already solid literary bona fides.